Sex “arranger” Scotty Bowers just after the end of World War II.Courtesy of Scotty Bowers

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Full Service

My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars

by Scotty Bowers with Lionel Friedberg

Grove Press

He was the busiest pump jockey in town . . . and it had nothing to do with gas.

In the days following World War II, the Richfield filling station on Hollywood Boulevard became a front for a prostitution ring, a place for actors to get their fill of debauchery. And at the center was a former Marine named Scotty Bowers, pimp to the stars.

In this shocking exposé, Bowers finally reveals his sexual liaisons with the rich and famous, sparing no details along the way. Of course, as he recounts his stories — each more unbelievable than the last — it’s worth noting that all the players are conveniently dead. It’s hard not to be skeptical.

The way Bowers depicts it, for instance, virtually everyone in Hollywood was gay, as were all his previously straight Marine buddies the second he dangled some cash in their faces; he had sex with just about every star he ever met, often hours (or even minutes) after introductions were made; and throughout his life, he could barely walk down a street or even lay in a park without someone making a beeline for his pants — an overture he says he welcomed every single time.

Typical is the anecdote about how it all began. Fresh out of the military, he gets a job pumping gas. He’s soon propositioned by a handsome middle-aged man who, when Bowers asked, “May I help you?” looked him up and down, flashed some cash and replied, “I’m sure you can.”

Several hours later he was skinny dipping and having “really hot sex” with the man in the car, who turned out to be famed “Mrs. Miniver” actor Walter Pidgeon.

Pick-ups of this sort became common, and when Bowers’ Marine buddies began hanging out at the station, he arranged the same for them.

When a customer — a total stranger — inquired about one Marine, Bowers quickly arranged for his otherwise straight friend to make $20 by letting the man perform a sex act on him.

As Bowers tells it, his buddies all wanted to get in on the action, and “within two days, three or four cars driven by gay men from the [nearby Hollywood] studios were pulling in every night . . . I was becoming the go-to guy in Hollywood for arranging tricks.”

The station became Hollywood’s very own Bunny Ranch, except that his version wasn’t for profit. Bowers says that in his 40 years as Hollywood’s sexual headhunter, he never charged for the service — seeking only to bring people pleasure — and that he only made money through sex when he was having it himself, which happened around two or three times a day.

While at first Bowers would simply arrange matches that would consummate elsewhere, eventually sex was taking place in the station’s washroom.

Soon after this began, Bowers “drilled a little quarter-inch hole down the wall of the washroom, just below the toilet paper holder,” and would charge people $5 to sit in the neighboring storeroom to watch couples have sex without them knowing.

Bowers’ enterprise grew further when, as luck would have it, a man with a “big custom trailer” needed a place to park it and paid Bowers to let him leave it at the station. Eventually, Bowers was arranging simultaneous liaisons in the station, the trailer and at a motel across the street.

As busy as the station became, Bowers was equally occupied with his own lustful encounters.

One day, Bowers was “cruised” by a man named Frank Horn, who used to walk his dog wearing just an overcoat then flash people as he went “to see their horrified reaction.” Horn, it turned out, was Cary Grant’s private secretary, and soon Bowers was getting into much “sexual mischief” with Grant and his constant companion, fellow actor Randolph Scott.

Over the years, Bowers claims, he had sex with the “pleasant, gentle” Vincent Price; Noel Coward; “Psycho” star Anthony Perkins; Tennessee Williams, who once wrote an article about Bowers’ life that Bowers successfully implored him to destroy; Beatles manager Brian Epstein, whom Bowers assisted in finding a place for the band to hide from groupies during their 1964 LA stop; and “Planet of the Apes” star Roddy McDowall, who was “heavily into poppers.” He arranged male guests for musician Cole Porter, in one case nine at a time.

Another Bowers trick was Spencer Tracy, whose legendary romance with Katharine Hepburn, Bowers writes, was a studio-created fiction designed to hide each stars’ homosexuality.

Bowers recalls a night that Tracy was drunk and upset. “I turned off the lights, undressed him, then got undressed myself, climbed into bed with him and held him tightly like a baby,” he writes.

Bowers had females in his harem as well. French singer Edith Piaf would “say sing-songy things in French, purring in a low, sugary kind of way” whenever the two had sex.

And when he met “Gone with the Wind” star Vivien Leigh and her husband Laurence Olivier — who, he says, “secretly harbored a liking for boys” — Bowers and Leigh developed a strong mutual attraction.

He tells of a night that Leigh stayed in the guest room of director George Cukor — another reportedly longtime Bowers trick — and Bowers, at Leigh’s request, snuck into her room after dark.

“That night we screwed as though the survival of the world depended on it,” Bowers writes. “She would squeal and holler and laugh.”

The better known he became, the more time Bowers spent arranging hook-ups for others. Hepburn, for instance, had him find her “nice, young, dark-haired” girls who were “not too heavily made-up,” and Bowers says he eventually provided her with over 150 different female sex partners.

And then there was the day Errol Flynn invited him to lunch.

“He told me that he was looking for some new talent. By that he meant women,” writes Bowers, who asked what type of women the “Robin Hood” star desired.

“Let’s put it this way,” Flynn said. “I like my booze old and my women young. Very young.” When Bowers reminded him of the laws against such things, Flynn replied, “Oh, tut tut, dear boy. I don’t care if she has to be 18, just as long as she looks and behaves like someone between, well, let’s say 14 and 16. Alright?”

Bob Hope, he writes, was also a regular client, and Bowers fixed him up with lots of “high class, expensive” hookers. Hope “didn’t take his time over anything. He never wasted any time — or money — on drinks or dinner or gifts or small talk.”

Another client, Desi Arnaz, got him in hot water. While Bowers was providing Arnaz with “two or three girls every few days,” Arnaz’s wife, Lucille Ball, grew increasingly angry and humiliated. Finally, at a party where Bowers was bartending, Ball, wearing a “beautiful long evening gown,” approached him and stared him down hard until finally slapping him in the face.

“You! You stop pimping for my husband, y’hear!” she screamed, as he tried to feign innocence. “I know exactly who you are, mister! Get out and stay out of my husband’s life!”

Others that Bowers arranged dalliances for included Howard Hughes, who was so fussy that a girl with even a slight blemish would be turned away; “avid sexual voyeur” W. Somerset Maugham; and actor Charles Laughton, whose reported perversion is too disgusting to even allude to in this newspaper.

(And while not for his own gratification, Dr. Alfred Kinsey relied on Bowers to arrange orgies that he could view for his now-infamous studies on sexuality.)

One non-Hollywood relationship Bowers had was with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Edward VIII and the woman he reportedly abdicated England’s throne to marry, Wallis Simpson.

Bowers writes that Edward and Simpson were actually both gay and that their widely reported love story was conjured up by the British royal family to obscure Edward’s promiscuous lifestyle.

The first time they met, Bowers writes, he and the Duke of Windsor slipped into a guest house, “stripped off, and began making out. Eddy was good. Really good.”

Bowers secured young men for Edward and pretty dark-haired girls for “Wally” for years, in addition to participating in orgies with them himself.

After once arranging a bungalow for them at the Beverly Hills Hotel, “We would have a mixture of half a dozen males and females engage in a display of gay and straight sex in the bungalow, and then Eddy, Wally and I would each pair off with the one we fancied most. There were indeed occasions when [Eddy] got involved in a three-way with Wally and another woman. But his preference was definitely for the boys.”

While Bowers’ casual attitude toward sex is already noted, he takes an especially surprising and cavalier approach toward one particular aspect of his sexuality.

His first sexual experience, he writes, came at around the age of 9, when a middle-aged male neighbor took him “to the woodshed.” The two kept on for a while, and Bowers writes that he was “grateful” to the man for “opening up a whole new chapter of learning.”

Throughout his teens, the resourceful Bowers helped his family survive the Great Depression by shining shoes, selling newspapers and turning tricks.

By the time he was around 13, he writes, he would go into bars, pool halls and poker games, and “many a time a guy would take me home and invite a few friends over to join in the fun. I didn’t mind at all. They would each leave me a few coins or as much as a dollar bill.”

Bowers’ sexually explosive lifestyle finally ended in the ’80s, as AIDS made its way though the gay community.

But if the tone of this book is to be believed, Bowers has no regrets — having led a life of pleasure, satisfaction and joy that the rest of us can only envy.

“Starting with that little session back with my neighbor, I look back on it all with warmth, gratitude and affection. I had fun,” he writes. “Not once have I felt shame or guilt or remorse about what I did. It’s been a fantastic life.”